Oxford’s Exscientia sells to US firm Recursion for $688m
Oxford-based pharmaceutical firm Exscientia has agreed to an acquisition by Recursion, a biotech from Utah, US, in a transaction worth $688 million.
The deal comes as major firms look to AI – as deployed by Exscientia in its pioneering drug discovery platform – in order to boost drug development.
Dr Chris Gibson, co-founder and CEO of Recursion, is expected to helm the newly combined company.
“We believe the proposed combination is deeply complementary and aligned with our missions to industrialize drug discovery to deliver high quality medicines and lower prices for consumers,” he said.
“Exscientia’s precision chemistry tools and capabilities, including its newly commissioned automated small molecule synthesis platform, will augment our tech-enabled biology and chemistry exploration, hit discovery and translational capabilities.
“I’m excited to continue building the best example of the next generation of biotechnology companies.
“It still feels like we’re just getting started.”
David Hallett, interim CEO and planned chief scientific officer of Recursion, added: “Adding Exscientia’s best-in-class focused precision oncology internal pipeline to Recursion’s first-in-class focused pipeline spanning rare disease, precision oncology and infectious disease is highly complementary as we look to bring treatments to patients faster.
“We look forward to bringing our teams together and integrating Recursion’s high throughput and target biology capabilities with Exscientia’s highly scalable molecular design and automated chemistry synthesis capabilities to truly accelerate the discovery of better drugs for patients.”
Once integrated, the companies believe the extended and evolved Recursion OS will enable the discovery and translation of higher quality medicines more efficiently and at a higher scale, with a full-stack technology-enabled small molecule discovery platform.
The combined business expects to read out approximately 10 clinical trials in the next 18 months.
It plans to collaborate with top global firms including Roche-Genentech, Sanofi, Bayer, and Merck KGaA.
There’s also the potential for approximately $200 million in milestone payments from partnerships over the next two years, as well as potential for more than $20 billion in revenue before royalties on net-sales of partnership programmes.
Allen & Company LLC acted as financial advisor to Recursion, and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati acted as legal counsel.
Centerview Partners LLC acted as financial adviser to Exscientia and A&O Shearman acted as legal counsel.
